Regarding the Photoshop reflection ‘that wasn’t there’

As some of you noticed one of designs featured in this article shows a proper reflection of the bottom om the chair. But this reflection is impossible to create in Photoshop unless you used an actual mirror during the shoot. (And we didn’t). The reflection was created afterwards but we cheated a bit…

You can’t copy / paste the chair and flip it vertically using Photoshop because the origional photo showed the chair from a higher point of view. The bottom of the chair is just not visible in the photo. We didn’t have an extra photo of the chair available so my collegue created one in Maya. He made sure the light source was aligned with the origional photo and rendered a high resolution image. This was combined with a copy of the woman/fish (that was flipped vertically). After applying a layer mask to create the ‘fade away’ effect the job was done.